There are two issues in this recent news story. First, obviously, is that Verizon Wireless is practicing a shameless kind of "gotcha!" marketing not worthy of any established brand. They are essentially instructing employees to trick customers out of whatever money they can be relieved of. Second, however, is the fact that this Verizon employee blew the whistle on them. He or she obviously does not agree with the company's policies here. My guess is there are many other employees at Verizon Wireless who also do not like to come to work each day with the goal of fooling customers out of their money.

Of course, you don't have to think too hard to realize that there are lots of 20th Century business models based on fooling customers out of their money, or taking advantage of customer errors (like mistakenly pressed cell-phone keys):

• Credit cards are a great example. Those poor souls who are so financially strapped or unsophisticated as to have to borrow on their credit cards month after month after month - for most credit card companies, those are the best customers!


• Or consider gift cards. They may be all the rage, but something like 15% of gift cards go unclaimed. Officially called "breakage," this is one of the big financial attractions of gift cards for retailers. I suspect it's also the primary reason that "gotcha!" marketers like Verizon issue their rebates in the form of cash cards, rather than checks.


• Mobile telecoms offer dozens of different pricing plans - but if you signed up for a plan that paid them more than you really needed to, do you think they would tell you?


• And don't forget retail banks, many of which (in the U.S. anyway) make a substantial portion of their operating earnings in the form of overdraft fees and other administrative penalties for customer mistakes. The margin on such fees can be as high as 90%, but when you build your business model around profiting from your customers' errors, you can't expect them to trust you.

I suspect many of the employees at these companies don't really enjoy the idea of making money off of consumer error or lack of information and would like to do a better job of serving their customers. The problem, of course, is that the executives and managers who set the policies are accountable for quarterly earnings, so they need a financial rationale to act more kindly toward customers. With the kind of customer analytics now available, this financial rationale is no longer hard to come by, but most companies simply haven't gone to the trouble.

Amazon.com, on the other hand, is one firm that makes a religion out of being customer-oriented (as opposed to quarterly earnings-oriented). I once pressed the "1-click order" button to buy a book I wanted from Amazon and received this message: "WARNING: You already bought this book from Amazon. Are you sure you want to buy it again?" Obviously, Amazon would not operate this way if it were managed by Verizon's executives. Verizon's policy would be to sell me the book and then challenge my ability to get a refund, if I happened to notice I had already bought it ("Hey, you ordered it fair and square! What are we, your accountants?").

The problem that Verizon and other such firms are coming up against now is that their employees are customers, too. They go online and into stores to buy things just like you and I do. And as customers they find themselves dealing with two different kinds of firms: There are the old-fashioned, industrial-era firms like Verizon, designed to squeeze every possible penny out of each immediate financial period (shades of BP's oil-drilling investment philosophy!), and then there are an increasing number of new-era firms like Amazon that have designed their processes around the objective of earning and keeping the trust of customers, based on the novel theory that customer trust is actually a highly valuable financial asset for a business. When it comes to handling mistakes, repairs, refunds and other problems, a lot of consumer businesses now buy in to Amazon's customer-centric model, from online marketers like 1800flowers.com and Zappos, to offline marketers like Apple, Bed Bath & Beyond, Target, and Wal-Mart.

It is the most natural thing in the world for a customer service employee (or any employee, for that matter) to want to treat her customer the way she would want to be treated herself, if she were the customer. And that's why Verizon's whistleblower blew the whistle. He or she was upset at the company's untrustworthy behavior toward its own customers - customers the Verizon employee was now being asked to treat poorly.

It is likely to be an increasing trend. A recent academic study found, for instance, that today's workers often break their own company's rules in order to better serve customer interests - and it is generally the best employees who do so first. The study's author, PhD student Cheryl Leo from Australia's Queensland University, calls it "pro-customer defiance." One employee in the study, for instance, "hinted to a customer that his organisation wasn't acting fairly and approaching the ombudsman might be the best way out." Moreover, Leo said, "some participants expressed a feeling of righteousness in their actions. They saw it as a moral action...Some study participants said they did it because it was 'always right to help others' or 'if it was me, I would want to be treated this way'."

Indeed. We all feel that way.